La Cañada Observatory, is an initiative by Juan Lacruz, the observatory started astrometric operations in the summer of 2002, it is registered as station J87 in the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union.

The Observatory also participates in the studies on minor bodies promoted by the Group on Meteorites, Minor Bodies, and Planetary Sciences of the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC-IEEC).



Friday, April 1, 2011

Improving observation residuals NEO 2011 DS9

NEO 2011 DS9 is a recently discovered Apollo NEO found on 2011-Feb-25 by J75 OAM Observatory La Sagra. It is catalogued as unusual by the Minor Planet Center. It has a short minimum orbital intersection distance with Jupiter and very low with Mars and the Earth.

Tisserand(J) 3.07 Taxonomy 8803 Apollo
MOID Earth 0.09 MOID Mars 0.04 MOID Jupiter 0.77

Quite a fast mover at 2.4 arc seconds per minute and magnitud 18.6 offered the oportunity to test the precission of the astrometry.

K11D09S KC2011 03 31.89475 09 46 03.19 +36 22 52.1 18.3 V J87
K11D09S KC2011 03 31.90300 09 46 01.56 +36 23 12.5 18.8 V J87
K11D09S KC2011 03 31.91124 09 45 59.92 +36 23 32.6 18.6 V J87


The measures were performed with Astrometrica on three stacks of individual exposures spanning around half an hour. The results according to the MPC are excellent with +/- 0.1 arc second residuals, this illustrates the power of astrometry on stacked frames when it is well executed.

20110331 J87 0.0 0.1-
20110331 J87 0.1+ 0.1+
20110331 J87 0.1- 0.0

The same data as analyzed by the NEODys at the university of Pissa with better processing resolution (3 decimal possitions) indicate consistent similar results :

RA DEC
---------------
-0.010 -0.095
0.026 0.035
-0.080 -0.060
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